A wide range of medical treatments exist that utilize medical devices including stents or endoluminal prostheses. As used herein, the term “stent” is intended to cover medical devices that are adapted for temporary or permanent implantation within a body lumen, including both naturally occurring and artificially made lumens, such as without limitation: arteries, whether located within the coronary, mesentery, peripheral, or cerebral vasculature; veins; gastrointestinal tract; biliary tract; urethra; trachea; hepatic shunts; and fallopian tubes.
Accordingly, different stents have been developed, each providing a uniquely beneficial structure to modify the mechanics of the targeted lumen wall. For example, stent prostheses are known for implantation within body lumens to provide artificial radial support to the wall tissue, which forms the various lumens within the body.
Stents have been made by a variety of methods, including forming a wire into waveform and helically wrapping the waveform around a mandrel, removing material from a tubular cylinder such as by a laser to leave a stent (sometimes referred to as a tubular slotted stent or a laser cut stent), and forming individual cylindrical components and attaching adjacent cylindrical components to each other to form a tube. Such methods can be laborious, expensive, and time-consuming. It would be desirable to use additive manufacturing techniques, also known as rapid prototyping methods and three-dimensional printing, to make stents and other medical devices. However, additive manufacturing techniques may be limited in making certain shapes for a medical device, and particularly for certain shapes of stents. For example, and not by way of limitation, certain medical devices that are generally tubular, such as stents, may be formed by additive manufacturing by building the medical device vertically. In other words, the longitudinal axis of the medical device is perpendicular to the surface or substrate upon which the medical device is built. In additive manufacturing, layers of material for the medical device are built upon previous layers of the material. In certain medical devices, such as certain stents, it is desirable for a significant portion of a perimeter of a first portion of the device to not be connected to a second portion of the device. For example, and not by way of limitation, in a stent with a plurality of bands formed from struts and crowns, it is often desirable for only some of the crowns of a band to be connected to crowns of an adjacent band. However, when building such a stent vertically by additive manufacturing as described above, it is desirable for connectors to be built between most or all of the crowns of adjacent bands in order to provide a support for the following layer of material.
In a solution described in U.S. Pat. No. 9,114,032 assigned to Medtronic Vascular, Inc., incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, connectors are formed between crowns of a stent by additive manufacturing. Some of the connectors are then removed by laser removal, chemical etching, or other methods. In particular embodiments, the connectors configured to be removed are formed from a different material than the connectors configured to remain. Then, the precursor stent is exposed to a chemical etchant that dissolves/removes the connectors configured to be removed without adversely affecting the stent components configured to remain. However, changing materials during additive manufacturing may complicate the process. Further, removal by chemical etching is not always desirable. Still further, mechanical removal of connectors may be difficult if the connectors to be removed are the same as the connectors to remain.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to build a medical device such as a stent by additive manufacturing with connectors between portions of the medical device that can be more easily, efficiently, and effectively removed without adversely affecting the remaining medical device.